In 1995's "Seven," one of the deadly sins villain Kevin Spacey rails against in his murderous diatribe is gluttony. In the first disturbing act of a well-orchestrated week of carnage, the antagonist forces an obese man to eat himself to death.

A bass Dwayne Mills ran across Tuesday in the marshes near Delacroix had obviously never seen the movie.

Mills was targeting bass on deep points with a bounty hunter-colored Slayer SST soft-plastic near Grand Lake when he felt a thump.

Nothing surprising there. Mills had spent the morning whacking bass and redfish in the area.

"Right now, the bass are staging up pretty good for the spawn," he said.

Mills set the hook, and the fish charged to the surface, revealing itself to be a bass and not a red. He brought it to the side of the boat, hoisted it over the gunwale and, like every good bass fisherman, stuck his thumb in the fish's mouth to hold it while he removed the hook.

When he did, he glanced into the gaping maw of the bass and saw that the Slayer wasn't going to be the fish's first meal of the day. It had at some point very recently eaten a rat, the head of which emerged from the fish's throat.

"I've read stories about redfish eating nutria babies, but I've never heard of a bass eating a rat," he said.

The area Mills was fishing is far from Delacroix's camps, so the creature was obviously just a wild rat that lived in the marsh.

Mills theorized the fish may have been overly hungry because it's investing so much energy into the approaching spawn, which is exceptionally late this year.

"Some of the fish may have (already spawned), but the ones I caught yesterday all had eggs," he said. "I've been bass fishing over here since the mid-1990s, and we've caught them in February already spawned out."